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Rating the Accessibility Features on the iPhone

Monday, May 13, 2013

*The following is a guest post by Mark Flores of Handi Enterprises. Mark has 17 years of experience in providing adaptive technology and communication devices and is confident that Handi Enterprise can provide solutions to meet your adaptive technology and communication needs.

When evaluating a product I
find it useful to compare it against what the manufacture says about it.
The 1st thing that jumps out at me about Apple’s literature on the
iPhone’s accessibility features as relates to motor impairment, is the fact
that they are touting features used by everyone, including those without
physical disabilities, as accessibility features. Reading this I have to
ask myself the question are features such as Siri or volume buttons really
accessibility features when they are used by everyone? Or is the iPhone
just thin on motor impairment accessibility features? Which leads me to
my 2nd question based on the iPhone accessibility features that I
use every day: is iPhone motor impairment accessibility at the forefront for
people that need it or is it just an afterthought?

I will rate the accessibility
features that I used in my 30 day experiment, of the iPhone 5, with these
questions in mind.

Ease-Of-Use

For the most part, the
accessibility features of the iPhone 5 that I used were relatively easy to
test. This is because most of them were located in the assistive touch
feature of the iPhone; which places a number of those features right on the
home screen in a small translucent ball that you can move around with your
fingers as necessary. With the assistive touch feature enabled I was able
to easily do things like: turn on Siri, lock my screen rotation into place;
(which turned out to be very important for my level of CP,) use the multitasking
feature without having to double tap the home button, control the volume of the
phone without having to struggle with the buttons on the side just to name a
few.

2 more accessibility features
on the iPhone 5 that I found quite helpful and easy to use were the voice
texting and the select text to read features. A recent addition to the
iPhone operating system (IOS) is the ability for you now to send text messages
inside iPhone’s text messaging app. You can imagine that for someone like
me who has limited use of my hands, the ability to transcribe your voice into
text right in the texting app is huge; as opposed to having to use a
third-party app to dictate, select, copy and paste my text like I had to
previously. The fact that he uses series voice recognition technology to
do the transcription also means that it is very accurate.

As somebody with a learning
disability that requires audio feedback for whatever I read the select text to
read feature was great. I did not have to change the text in any way or
copy and paste it to a third-party app to get it to work. The voice
feedback was very smooth and I was the default read speed setting and it was
fine. When pressed me the most about it was that it could read virtually
any text in any application including the Internet.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Responsiveness

Although I did find that the
iPhone 5 was quite responsive there is one accessibility feature that I did not
feel was responsive at all. This was the gestures feature. The way
that this feature is supposed to work is that you can create 1 or 2 finger
movements to more easily execute iPhone movements that could be tricky for
someone with dexterity issues. These movements could include things like
pinching and stretching or swiping. I just could not get this to work
even and when I was able to create gestures they only worked the way they were
supposed to 50% of the time. Which for someone that needs it to work is
not acceptable. Because I found that gestures were not responsive to me
but everything else was, I am giving the iPhone 5 a 3 out of 5 rating when it
comes to the responsiveness of their accessibility features.

Does the product perform as
advertised?

When I looked at whether or not
the iPhone 5’s accessibility features performed as advertised in helping
me use the phone it depended on what I was doing with it. If I was doing
things like dictating text or reading emails they performed
fantastically. The assistive touch features that were already built into
the accessibility also performed as advertised but as mentioned before I could
not use gestures to help me navigate through the phone. Because of these
reasons I mentioned I will rate the iPhone 5 accessibility features a 4 out of
5 for performing as advertised.

How much physical dexterity
is required to use the product i.e. can anyone with any disability utilize it?

The accessibility features of
the iPhone 5 are surprisingly stable. As such once I turned them on they
did not all of a sudden stop working as can happen with some different models
of phones. This meant that my need to exercise my dexterity was minimal
in most instances. However, I did have to use my dexterity in navigating
through the iOS or selecting text for the phone to read. This can be difficult
for many individuals with physical disabilities to do. There are some
external pieces of adaptive technology you can buy that will minimize the need
to use your hands with the iPhone. We will talk about some of these in a
future post. The iPhone does have many different assistive technology features
that I do not use to help people with many other types of disabilities in using
the phone such as a larger text and voice over. We will also be talking
about some of the accessibility features for people living with visual
impairments in a future post. As a result of the phones need to still be used by
hand even if some accessibility features are turned on I am giving the iPhone 5
a rating of 3 out of 5 under physical dexterity required.

Overall Rating

Overall the iPhone 5 and its
accessibility features receive a rating of 14 out of 20. I have come to
believe that the iPhone 5 is an easy-to-use phone. This is because there
is not much to it. If you are looking for a phone whose accessibility
features function as advertised for the most part and whose operating system is
quite easy to learn from a physical accessibility standpoint the iPhone 5 may
be for you. I do believe that the iPhone would become the smart phone of
choice for people with physical disabilities if they had stronger voice control
functionality, like the ability to answer the phone or turn off the alarm by
voice.

Stay tuned for next week’s post
and I will begin by talking about my experience with the Samsung Galaxy S3.